The art of forging credentials was well understood in the Middle Ages, and the purpose of this addition was to silence doubters by the imprimatur of the highest authority, just as the marvel of the Dancers of Colbek is confirmed by the sponsorship of Pope Leo IX (I 246-9). The different interpretation of the latest editor, Hamelius, who thinks it was intended as a sly hit at the Papacy (Quarterly Review for April 1917, pp. 349 f.) seems to rest on the erroneous assumption that the passage belonged to the French text as originally written.
The anachronism by which the author is made to seek the Pope in Rome gives a clue to the date of the interpolation. From the beginning of the fourteenth century until 1377 Avignon, and not Rome, was the seat of the Pope; and for another thirty years there was doubt as to the issue of the conflict between the popes, who had their head-quarters at Rome and were recognized by England, and the antipopes, who remained at Avignon and had the support of the French. The facts were notorious, so that the anachronism would hardly be possible to one who wrote much before the end of the century, even though he were a partisan of the Roman court.
From internal evidence it would seem that the interpolation first appeared in French. The style is the uniform style of translation, with the same tags—and ȝee schull vndirstonde = et sachiez; ȝif it lyke ȝou = si vous plest; and the same trick of double rendering, e.g. of dyuerse secte and of beleeve; wyse and discreet; the auctour ne the persone. More decisive is an example of the syntactical compromise explained in the note to l. 329: be the whiche the Mappa Mundi was made after. With so many French MSS. of Mandeville in use in England, an interpolation in French would have more authority than one that could not be traced beyond English; and it can hardly be an insuperable objection that no such French text exists to-day, since our knowledge of the Cotton and Egerton versions themselves depends in each case on the chance survival of a single MS.
The point has a bearing on the vexed question of the relations of the English texts one to another. For brevity we may denote by D the defective text of the early prints and most MSS., which is specially distinguished by a long gap near the beginning; by C the Cotton text (ed. Halliwell, Pollard, Hamelius); by E the Egerton text (ed. Warner). Nicholson (in the Encyclopaedia Britannica) and Warner give priority to D, and consider that C and E are independent revisions and expansions of D by writers who had recourse to the French original. Their argument seems to be this: There is precise evidence just before the gap that D derives direct from a mutilated French text (see Enc. Brit.), and if it be granted that a single translation from the French is the base of C, D, and E, it follows that C and E are based on D.
A fuller study by Vogels (Handschriftliche Untersuchungen über die Englische Version Mandeville's, Crefeld 1891) brings to light a new fact: the two Bodleian MSS., E Museo 116 and Rawlinson D 99, contain an English translation (say L) made from a Latin text of the Travels. Vogels also shows that E is based on D, because the characteristic lacuna of D is filled in E by a passage which is borrowed from L and is not homogeneous with the rest of E. So far there is no conflict with the view of Nicholson and Warner. But, after adducing evidence in favour of the contention that C, D, and E are at base one translation, Vogels concludes that D derives from C, arguing thus: There is good evidence that C is a direct translation from the French, and if it be granted that a single translation from the French is the base of C and D, it follows that D derives from C.
In short, the one party maintains that C is an expansion of D, the other that D is an abridgement of C; and this flat opposition results from the acceptance of common ground: that C and D represent in the main one translation and not two translations.
To return to our interpolation:
(1) Vogels's first piece of evidence that C, D, and E are at base one translation is the appearance in all of this interpolation, which is absent from the MSS. in French. But a passage so remarkable might spread from one to the other of two independent English texts; or if the interpolation originated in England in a MS. of the French text since lost, it might be twice translated.
(2) Vogels assumes that the interpolation first appeared in type C. But C is the form in which it would be least likely to originate, because here the contradiction of statement is sharpest owing to the rendering at ll. 313-14: and now I am comen hom, which is peculiar to C (see the French).
(3) If, in order to eliminate individual peculiarities, we take two MSS. of the D type—say Harley 2386 and Royal 17 C. XXXVIII—we find that their text of the interpolation is identical with that of E. This is consistent with Vogels's finding that the body of E derives from D; and it confirms the evidence of all the defective MSS. that the interpolation in this particular form was an integral part of the D type.